Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely starting to fear an almost universal dumbing down of humanity as a result of AI. It feels like so many people have just stopped caring about what they do or what they create. They no longer believe they need to know what they are doing or care about the results. The machines will do the knowing and caring for them. Or they won't - but what they produce without knowing or caring will be good enough to tick whatever boxes are necessary so it doesn't matter.

Over the years I have enjoyed many deep and interesting technical discussions online - both here on HN and elsewhere. I can't help feeling that those discussions have also all but disappeared over the past few months - alongside high quality free material that some experts have kindly given away but increasingly no longer do. I rarely find myself contributing any more because there is little on any of my usual online hangouts that is interesting enough to spark a deep technical discussion any more. It's 90% AI stuff - either written about AI or (usually poorly) written by AI - and most of the discussions that do initially catch my interest at all seem to end being very negative and depressing. (I appreciate the irony that I'm perpetuating that cycle right now. Looking through my relatively sparse recent contributions to HN is actually quite depressing. Although at least I actually am getting out more!)

I wouldn't mind so much if I believed the hype about the benefits of AI-generated work and thought that overall this period would be a net win for humanity. Unfortunately I don't really believe that. I fear the LLM era will eventually be remembered for producing tools that could do average/routine tasks quickly and to an acceptable standard but that were actually used to (try to) do good/innovative tasks with substandard results. But by the time enough decision-makers realise this it might be too late and the damage might already be done and hard to reverse.

There's another, much darker aspect to this: If people outsource their thinking to AI, they outsource it to entities controlled by a handful of people.

Altman, Musk et al are making a play for being the default epistemic authority of society.

Your comment is even more depressing when you realise this applies to other elements of our daily lives, including but not restricted to oil, environmental management, societal support...

Funny how our short feedback loops and greed pushes people towards deeply unstable systems, especially if the price seems so "cheap" for a reward sold as so incredible that it would be dumb not to bet on it...

...and it sure as hell doesn't help, that "social" media (not networks) is annihilating people's attention spans and ability to care, beyond upvoting and meaningless comments (like this one!).

Agree on all except for this part

> The machines will do the knowing and caring for them

I don’t think it’s “the machines”, it’s the big 2-3 corporations the ones doing the thinking for us (aka controlling). These AI agents are whatever these corporations want them to be and will configure them as they see fit. We are outsourcing intelligence to a few companies.

I blame the titans, industry.

The corporations ever growing size is what scares me the most. Why care when you are a replaceable cog in a massive sprawling machine? Why care when your effort is not particularly seen or rewarded?

People's jobs are no longer something that connects us to other people around us, or the world at large. And these massive orgs are caring less and less about their people.

I do think AI compounds this. Yes. But also, what parts of the world are actively seeking involvement, are dynamic places with apparent rife potential? The world just doesn't care, doesn't have the engagement points it did.

Tech in particular has really lost its luster as a dynamic place. Tech has gotten much more mature, much more industrial scale & less new & creative.

And then: the titans have consistently eaten all the younger children. The big companies swallow up all the interesting new places. The monoculture of these ultra massive ultra wealthy titans, who've been doing the same intermediation enshittification plays for decades now, is not exciting, is not a vibrant thing: it's tiresome to the world to endure these titans, rather than interesting and thrilling a scene to be a part of.

I have similar fears. I honestly think that this may be the mechanism by which the global capital order falls into a version of late-Soviet decay and collapse -- a major boon to the oligarchs, just as it was in Russia.

Just as the production and service bureaucracy of the USSR ceased to care about the value of their work (so long as they technically fulfilled their plan), we are possibly headed for a world where all the "real economy" workers (in manufacturing, logistics, etc.) will be guided by the output knowledge workers and managers driving AI, who are being judged by yet more management using AI, who are ultimately judged by investors using AI and the whole thing gets disconnected from any actual ground truth -- just as planning did in the Soviet case.

When the whole thing collapses, somebody will be around to pick up the pieces (and valuable capital equipment, land, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. I suspect the kernel of whatever comes next will come from China, but also suspect it will bear more than a passing resemblance to Putin's Russia -- a small clique of rentier-gangster kingpins semi-legally seizing everything in sight and cobbling together an autocratic oligarchy that creaks along without meaningful challenge.

> which the global capital order falls into a version of late-Soviet decay and collapse -- a major boon to the oligarchs, just as it was in Russia

We were already on track for that anyway. This just adds an interesting twist to it.

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